Cannabis use disorder and subsequent risk of depression and bipolar disorder
jamanetwork.com
jamanetwork.com
That said, as someone who is bipolar, has bipolar friends and has used cannabis for a significant portion of my half-century on Earth, cannabis usage is proportional to mood instability in myself and my friends. I have taken extensive breaks and noticed I am much more mentally resilient and less emotionally labile when taking breaks.
This can be true at the same time that cannabis use disorder increases the likelihood of mental illness is true. These are not mutually exclusive.
"Apt or likely to change."
is it grammatically correct to say "there is nothing more non-labile than a temporary code"
Probably a more common context for these words to occur is medicine, or more broadly toxicology, where you might have heard:
Heat labile vs heat stabile
The overall sentence is syntactically incorrect because you forgot to put a question mark at the end.
The sentence is semantically correct (which you actually meant to ask), though with a better alternate, as explained by the sibling comment.
Both can be true, weed can help with mood swings by numbing you out or shifting your mental state somewhere else. Weed can also be harmful because it numbs you, but harmful in a latent and subtle sort of way.
I experiment with the gummy's afterwards and found that the depression post usage effect was still present. Something about using them as pain relief changed how my mind responded to THC.
For sure, but that's an association. Which one actually caused the other? eg. perhaps you got into a state of mind that was less emotionally labile and so decided to take a break.
Sometimes I don't use cannabis for a while and feel fine. Then, while still feeling fine I unexpectedly end up in a situation where I can smoke a joint. Maybe it shows up at a birthday party. The days after there is a noticable change in my emotion regulation (less stable, easily feeling down).
I am also terrified the medications we force on some mental health patients, especially injected long-term ones, are purely for the benefit of the care taker and not the individual.
I think cannabis had fell into a niche of "self-medication", for people who the system doesn't seem to work for. Cannabis nor alcohol are the ideal medications, they are simply the only ones most easily available.
What are some of the impacts?
I remember the show "Homeland" the main character had a sister who was a doc who would prescribe her meds for bipolar, that way she could continue working for the government/Pentagon as a spy.
Mental Illness is a very broad term.
Marijuana is absolutely a drug with downsides. There are also upsides - for example I enjoy my life more. I also enjoy alcohol, sometimes to excess. I acknowledge I have taken likely years of my life away through my actions. I have also dabbled in cocaine and ecstasy. I don’t think those drugs should be totally illegal either.
My point is we all make our own decisions and are forced to accept risk. Sometimes you just have to live. Otherwise why bother living?
It's important to understand the risks so that one can make informed choices. That is probably where there needs to be more research.
I only have issues with those who smoke so much it reeks even when they are not smoking or I am 10ft away from them and still smell it.
I supported, and still support, legalization. But the smell is a serious issue. Even just driving down the road I catch a whiff from other cars or buildings nearly every day.
One of the more academic investigations of addiction, the book High Price by Carl Hart, suggests that the real experience of addiction is substantially different from the way most people think of it and most addicts eventually quit on their own for a range of reasons. This suggests that the very concept of "cannabis use disorder" may not really make sense.
I've known people who used cannabis the way alcoholics use alcohol - if it wasn't a use disorder, I don't know what is. The concept is valid and can apply to sorts of things from gambling, pron, online gaming even. If the use becomes problematic then its a problem, 'use disorder' is the just the name for this.
Then the next week, the clinician leader of the support group laid down a few ground rules for the new members, one of them being "if you show up while you're high, then you'll be gone just as quickly".
So I think it's safe to say that there is a range of opinions and attitudes among clinical professionals.
One can also pick how to battle. A hostile zero tolerance edict wasn't necessary to anything.
As long as pointless hostility gets a pass (as it does in your reply) and is allowed to be part of a solution - it isn't a great solution.
She enjoys her drugs, of all kinds. She worked hard to connect with a psychiatrist who could both prescribe the sorts of drugs she's into, and also not shame her for the recreational drugs she does on the side. She pays out-of-pocket for the privilege.
It became apparent to me that she's not really into treatment of her condition or healing, or repairing her relationships with friends and family. She just seemed to be on a hedonistic journey of seeking pleasure.
So you can decriminalize and reschedule all the drugs you want, but people will self-medicate, and find dangerous uses. People who use illegal or OTC or alternative treatments will not always report those to their physician or pharmacy. Even if they do, all interactions are not known, but many dangerous ones can result from trying to put someone on psychotropics while they're under the influence of something else.
But not without NNTs. For depression, OR = 1.8, NNT = 12 (assuming 10% lifetime incidence, this is very hard to estimate due to the difficulty in diagnosis). For bipolar disorder, OR = 3, NNT = 25. This is before accounting for any reverse causation: roughly 80% of incidence of BPD is associated with genetic variation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_needed_to_treat
So e.g. assuming a fully causal association with bipolar disorder (unlikely due to the strong genetic influence on bipolar disorder) you need 25 people to stop smoking weed to prevent one case of bipolar disorder. You can also calculate it in terms of how many people do you need to imprison to prevent one case of bipolar disorder.
This is particularly revealing when you look at studies giving an odds ratio of 2-3 for cannabis use associated with schizophrenia. The base rate for schizophrenia is <0.02% [1], so the NNT is >2500. You probably need to imprison hundreds of people to prevent one case of schizophrenia, again assuming the association is causal.
The claim that these studies should impact marijuana legality is just plain bad math.
1: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
Heirloom strains had CBD alongside THC.
CBD on its own has been as effective in research as antipsychotics in treating schizophrenia, and very much mitigates the OP effects in research.
But the vast majority of product today has selectively bred out the CBD.
It's time we stop talking about cannabis use and start regarding it as THC use, as the full spectrum of the original plant is no longer what people are really using.
It'd be like selectively breeding high arsenic almonds and then people getting sick eating them and declaring the problem as one impacting almond consumption instead of more specifically arsenic consumption.
THC unmitigated by CBD is a psychiatric sleeping giant that's currently not being addressed because the pendulum swing is still glowing strong with legalization momentum and any criticism is generally dismissed as simply being anti-cannabis use generally.
I just hope in few years/decades we will have our well-bred 3% THC joints sold as equal.
The challenge with running studies ethically is that you can't split your test groups into two groups and somehow induce cannabis use disorder and see if major depression, bipolar, etc results from it. Rather, you can see if the people who naturally develop the disorder also have those problems.
The flaw in this reasoning is that people who develop depression and similar issues are likely to self-medicate with cannabis. In related news, umbrellas do not cause rain.
Before you dismiss that is philosophical non-sense, causality is closely related to the "Arrow of Time" which is considered an unsolved problem in physics [0]. From what we've observed time appears to be the only asymmetric physical process, largely due to entropy (that is you can immediately tell if a video of a jar breaking is being played backwards because we don't expected a jar to "fall together"). There are Quantum processes, for example, that are time symmetric, that is playing a video of these processes would look the same reversed and forward.
That said, as someone who does a lot of statistics, in practice what we do is model the causal process with a directed acyclic graph and see how well our models behave under causal assumptions. These work okay for answering practical questions about does A cause B. By controlling for correlating variables we can see the impact on what we believe to be a causal variable when we condition on these other correlating factors.
Worth mention that nearly all of the work is done by linear models in practice.
> we've never successfully answered Hume's general skepticism about the existence of causality as something that is real outside of our own minds
The quote seems to imply a strong consensus, but [1] disagrees.
The phrasing "the existence of causality as something that is real outside of our own minds" sounds like philosophical idealism [2]. One can take that view without discussing causation at all, seems to me. Forgive the following blunt questions: how is philosophical idealism either (a) useful or (b) testable? To me, currently, it seems to be neither.
Maybe I'm missing something? For those that get value from it, what are some practical take-aways you get out of thinking about Hume's 'problem of induction'?
I'm very much into philosophy, but I admit I don't see a lot of utility in digging into this outside of historical purposes. It feels to me that the tools from inferential statistics combined with some deeper study on causation are far more useful and enlightening than trying to figure out the historical context around Hume's writing here. I'm glad other people do it, for sure, but what I've skimmed doesn't "grab" me.
WRT causation, I often return to the idea of "no model is perfect, but some are useful". There are many times when we build useful models that -- when combined with proper experimentation -- very strongly indicate causation. The laws of physics, for example. As soon as people get involved, it gets messy.
Unfortunately many of the people who create introductory science courses seem to mostly only be aware of Popper, so most students are aware of the importance of falsifiability but not of its problems. I suspect this is because reading Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend leaves one with an impression that science isn't an objective endeavour and this is an uncomfortable truth when start from a belief that science is some infallible rationalist project. Personally it transformed my view from "trust the science"(TM) to "question the science, always." Science isn't always science unfortunately.
In my view the 'real' problem we currently have is that we cannot test hypothesis in isolation (Duhem-Quine thesis). Thus we rely on heuristics like "scientific consensus" to judge whether the hypothesis that make up a field are gaining predictive power or not. The solution to all these problems is to use the Lakatosian Method of Scientific Research Programmes to track a field's progress over time. Anything less than this just devolves into Kuhnian paradigms, which is basically a popularity contest to determine 'valid' scientific methods.
I think this 'real' problem can explain all the failures of modern science: the replication crisis, abuse of statistical methods, funding influencing results.
> “Around 20% of young people in Denmark use cannabis but in this study fewer than 1% of the sample had been assigned a diagnosis of cannabis use disorder and these may well have been people who had a pre-existing susceptibility to depression and other psychiatric disorders.
> “Other studies have shown that cannabis use itself is not associated with increased risk of depression, so perhaps we are seeing that people with a pre-existing susceptibility to depression are more likely to be diagnosed with cannabis use disorder. This clearly does not mean that we should infer that cannabis somehow causes depression.
> “I don’t think that this study provides us with much information to help decide the extent to which cannabis use is, or is not, harmful.”
[1] https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-...
!A & B
A & !B
A & B
!A & !B
A
B
!A
!BThe famous phrase "correlation does not mean casuation" is not equal to "correlation is indistingushable from casuation", but that's how people seem to often treat it.
Ideally, the paper abstract should be clear about what can or can not be concluded. In the title they say "subsequent" as if suggesting casuality, but in the abstract they say "associated". Confusing for a layman such as me.
My intuition of how to distinguish correlation from casuation:
If cannabis and depression were symmetrically connected, then incease of chances for cannabis use between depressed was equal to the increase of chances for depression between cannabis users.
If cannabis increases chances for depression more that depression increases chances for cannabis, than we conclude cannabis tends to cause depression.
Formula: percentage of depressed between canabis users / percentage of depressed in general population > persentage of cannabis users between depressed / persentage of cannabis users in general population.
Something like that.
(c&d/c)/(d/total) > (c&d/d)/(c/total)
c&d*total/c*d > c&d*total/d*c function takeMeasurement() {
// c (the cause) itself has probability 0.5
// d (the dependent) in absence of c has probability 0.5
// but the presence of c increases it to 0.7
const c = Math.random(1.0) < 0.5;
const d = Math.random(1.0) < (c ? 0.7 : 0.5);
return {c, d};
}
P(c) = 0.5
P(d|!c) = 0.5
P(d|c) = 0.7
P(d) = ?
P(c|!d) = ?
P(c|d) = ?
-------------------------------
P(d) = P(c)*P(d|c) + P(!c)*P(d|!c) =
= P(c)*P(d|c) + (1 - P(c))*P(d|!c) =
= 0.5*0.7 + 0.5*0.5 = 0.35 + 0.25 =
= 0.6
P(c|!d) = P(c) * P(!d|c) / P(!d) =
= P(c) * (1 - P(d|c)) / (1 - P(d)) =
= 0.5 * 0.3 / 0.4 =
= 0.374(9)
P(c|d) = P(c) * P(d|c) / P(d) =
= 0.5 * 0.7 / 0.6 = 0.35 / 0.6 =
= 0.58(3)
-------------------------------
Bayes formula:
P(a|b) = P(a) * P(b|a) / P(b)
function takeMeasurement2() {
const d = Math.random(1.0) < 0.6;
const c = Math.random(1.0) < (d ? 0.58333 : 0.374999);
return {c, d};
}We can compose DAGs that control for the factors we do know about, but it's impossible to exhaust or even know all possible latent processes that are impacting the outcome.
E.g. to show that A does not cause B, while B (or a latent factor B correlates with) causes A?
When people say that the study can equally be interpretted as cannabis disorder causes depression and as depression causes cannabis disorder, can't statistics show that these two hypothesys are not equal?
They showed the link between smoking and cancer with a mountain of empirical evidence, including tests on mice. https://www.mskcc.org/news/how-do-cigarettes-cause-cancer
> Cannabis is federally illegal in the United States
Nobody cares anymore.
> I'd highly advise you to consider only the known benefits of using cannabis
Sugar has no health benefits and causes way more deaths. If you want to really change the world for the better, I suggest a war on ice cream.
> Treat any form of smoking, including smoking cannabis, with high suspicion, as it involves inhaling large concentrations of combustion products.
Finally, we agree: consume edibles.
Yes, it does now. From what I've seen, people complain about how long it took for official action in labeling to take place on tobacco smoking, but it's up to them how much effort they want to put into preventing a repeat situation. For a somewhat related example, some people think the FDA puts so much effort into preventing a repeat of thalidomide that it's a net negative for the entire organization to exist at all, and suggest expanding the category of "legal but not (effectively) mandated" to include almost all proposed drugs. "Never again" is much harder and more costly than many people think, because you have to get it right (or err in the direction of preventing the type of outcome in question) every single time, but if a single thing gets through, it's all over.
Make your decisions as rationally as possible.
> I suggest a war on ice cream.
Ice cream has some pretty funny statistics that I don't really buy as making actual sense. I'd limit usage quite heavily.
This really depends on the context. Note the various news articles currently going around that highlight the increased scrutiny Musk faced when he smoked weed publicly on a podcast. It’s still federally illegal and that can still come with very real consequences.
That's not even really true anymore. I live in Texas, which has virtually no legal weed (beyond medical marijuana for a very small number of specific conditions like epilepsy and ALS - it's not like other states where you can say "Hey doc, I've got a headache, can I get a marijuana prescription?"), and yet I can walk into a nice, clean, friendly store in a strip mall and pick up some D9 gummies and brownies, as well as some THCA bud that to me is indistinguishable from "normal" marijuana.
The fact is the 2018 farm bill that legalized hemp had enough loopholes that it essentially legalized marijuana as well. While a lot of this is in a gray area (particularly in the case of THCA bud which appears to me to be a pretty blatant misrepresentation of the law, but I ain't complaining), it's clear there is no appetite anywhere to crack down on these loopholes. For example, Florida considered a bill this year that would crack down on D9 products, but there was already enough entrenched business opposition that the bill was killed.
Weed is legal in the US. If you're worried about legal consequences, just pay a little more and go to a nice dispensary and you're fine.
Mental illness and substance use both affect/are effected by the Brain. It seems less likely that the same cause would affect both the Brain and the Lungs.
Note, the study speaks of risk of depression - depresion happens after they have cannabis use disorder. Hence "Subsequent" in the study title.
They didn't prove cause and effect, only association.
There is a large community of people who are trying to quit: /r/leaves
The article is nothing new to me. Read a few posts from the subreddit and you'd see a pattern.
Three weeks ago, I was pro-weed recreation legalization. Today, I'm strongly anti recreation use.
Edit: I'm not against decriminalization of weed. I'm highly against pro-recreational use. I'm against high THC %, easy access, advertisements, sponsorships, etc. I believe weed should be classified as a highly addictive drug - especially to youth. We should not have weed stores. It should be sold behind the counter. It should have a very high tax so that it's not cheap. It should have huge, bold warning labels on packaging. It should not be legalized at the federal level.
Haha like all reformed addicts of anything. I'm strongly anti cigarettes.
Extremely high THC products coupled with professional marketing agencies? Yikes. We're going to have a weed epidemic soon. Maybe it's a silent epidemic now.
Whatever it is, it's been underway for long enough for the pot-parade of horribles to manifest itself. Heavy weed smokers are all over - but we aren't surrounded by ruin that is clearly attributable to pot.
If you have extra concern to invest, may I suggest one of our most pressing psychological catastrophe?
The criminalization of childhood growth (adult-free time) and the erasure of critical free range land. We've brought complete ruin to childhood and parenting in just two generations. Whatever you think pot is doing, this is actually far, far worse.
Making everything that can be harmful to some subset of the population illegal is not the way to deal with these issues. It's reductio ad absurdum into a totalitarian nanny state that literally controls your diet and makes you drive 25 mph on the highway.
It's not the government's job to make everything that could possibly hurt you if you overdo it unavailable to you.
I agree with you that cannabis can be very harmful to some people, and that the risks are often understated. But if you want to help people who are susceptible in this way, the solution is to help them realize they have a problem, develop self-discipline, and understand that while cannabis may be harmless to many people, for them it is not, and what works for many others (occasional moderate use) won't work for them.
In short, people with this issue should take responsibility, join a 12 step program, and fix the problem in themselves rather than expecting all of society to adapt itself to not trigger their addiction. That you can't use it in moderation doesn't mean no one can, just like there are probably many things you can do in moderation that other people aren't able to.
1. Weed has a mostly benign image right now. It has good PR.
2. It's much harder to realize that you're addicted to weed - unlike alcohol. Alcohol addiction is obvious to people around you as well. Not weed. Many weed addicts do not have the self awareness.
3. Weed can be significantly cheaper than alcohol per session - thus consuming more is economical for many. A few drinks at a bar could cost you $100 vs eat a weed gummy for $2 and then go out.
4. Weed addiction takes place over a long period of time. It could take years before you realize the negative effects. It's obvious for alcohol immediately.
Many millions of people are able to use cannabis moderately and responsibly. If for whatever reason you can't, that's up to you to deal with--there are many resources available that can help. Taking it away from everyone because you have a problem is not a reasonable solution.
Making a habit of driving 100mph on a motorcycle will probably kill you about as quickly on average as either of those drugs, and is more dangerous to other people to boot. Should motorcycles therefore also be illegal? If not, why not? If the goal is to stop people from hurting themselves, why are you only focused on one particular way that people can hurt themselves?
The government can't ban everything that has a risk of death. You could die if a tree falls on you randomly. The government isn't going to ban trees. It has to do with the magnitude of the problem to society. Motorcyclists getting killed, although a problem, is not that high of a problem to society in the US.
Are you a software developer or work in tech? There are millions of things you can do to improve your product but you always prioritize the most important ones first, right? Best bang for the buck. And you'll likely never reach the improvements at the bottom of the list.
"It has to do with the magnitude of the problem to society. Motorcyclists getting killed, although a problem, is not that high of a problem to society in the US."
Considering that cannabis kills exactly no one, you seem to be arguing against your own point here.
See my tree falling example.
>Considering that cannabis kills exactly no one, you seem to be arguing against your own point here.
Nope. You're using deaths as the measuring stick. I'm using impact to society.
Maybe this is a US/Canada thing, but it is deeply untrue in the UK. Cannabis has a terrible image here, as opposed to alcohol. Someone who drinks a bottle of wine a night would not be frowned upon.
I never tell people at work that I consume cannabis, not even people I am friends with, as it leads to all kinds of assumptions and prejudices.
Can you please share your sources? I'm always happy to be persuaded by studies.
It's long past the point of "people with this issue should take responsibility".
If you enjoy weed, and I think that's fine if you do, you should be able to forsee a future where the weed industry in a capitalist system with few regulations ends up in the same position as the food industry: having created highly addictive and unhealthy products to the point of causing massive and lasting damage to society.
It would be better to smartly regulate early on and avoid the disaster and the predictable overreaction as a result. It is hard to smartly regulate. But worth the investment if you want to continue enjoying something.
And smart regulations don't require a nanny state as you implied. You can still choose to smoke cigarettes. But smoking has declined from 20.9% of adults in 2005 to 11.5% in 2021. Thanks in part to smart regulations and higher taxes.
At the very least we should be willing to tax harmful substances at the same rate at which they cost society.
That's not a nanny state. That's just fair. Why should I pay a part of your choice to smoke cigarettes?
Unlike alcohol addiction, which can come on fast, weed grabs a hold of you over a longer period. It starts out as only beneficial with little to no downside. You won't notice you're addicted until much later.
Also, I find your decision to call the plant marijuana interesting. The names weed and pot have a negative connotation. But "marijuana" sounds a lot more acceptable. Nothing to do with you. Just something I noticed.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/29/marijuana-na...
You speak as if marijuana is highly addictive when in fact it is less addictive than coffee and easier to quit.
This is highly fascinating, and opens the door towards in nuanced manipulation of marijuana plant genetics in order to create strains with the benefits, but without the addictive side effects and tailoring that genetic strain manipulation to the genetics of the individual user where they could undergo a kind of a genetic test, and then the strain could be tailored to meet their exact desired profile without any addictive qualities.
How many societies have legalized marijuana?
I don’t think it has much to do with wanting to help or protect anyone, or else you would see more consistency in the things people want to make illegal. It’s more akin to religious people who think they know the “right” way to live and want to impose those values on everyone.
Many people just have an emotional dislike of cannabis for whatever reason—seeing its effect on others makes them uncomfortable, so they want to stop everyone from doing it. Soda and motorcycles don’t make them uncomfortable, so they don’t care about those.
The other posters here have a point. If one is vocal against cannabis while mostly giving alcohol a pass - it makes it harder to respect warnings of harm.
After 5 generations of lying drug war PR and ridiculous propaganda, this deeply incredulous debate needs a lot to be worth considering.
I believe it's easier to get addicted to weed than alcohol. I think time will prove me right.
Think of it this way. Let's say there are 100 people in a society. Without weed, 5 are addicted to alcohol. With weed, 20 are addicted to weed and 3 are addicted to alcohol. Yes, there will be fewer alcohol addicts, but we added 20 weed addicts. Is this better for society? I don't believe so.
You're welcomed to disagree.
I’ve been to inpatient chemical dependency treatment twice, once for opiate addiction and once for alcohol addiction. There were 0 people that were inpatient for marijuana use.
Now the argument looks completely different, yet still holds 0 value.
It seems to me you are scared of weed now, and with your honest good will want to save others from it as well. That's nice and all, but please don't presume you know better than everyone, or even better than "those who haven't tried it yet".
I have had my fair share of experiences with weed, and while I agree that mindless consumption will bring harm (ask me how I know), I also believe that just landing hard in this case helped me discern this pattern in other areas of my life too - so (in my subjective experience) even this harm it brought me _directly_ improved my life in the long run. And that's before I start talking about effect it had outside its most obvious harm.
I advocate for education, and responsible trials for anyone curious, and I believe it can bring many positive changes into ones life. One just have not to abuse it.
I'd much rather be in a room with 20 stoners than 5 drunks.
My stance is, just because alcohol is bad for you, doesn’t mean weed is good for you.
I’d rather not be in a room with either group though.
You don’t seem to recognize that, at its enactment, drug prohibition had absolutely nothing to do with any sort of literal harm drugs caused to their users. Look up the horrifically racist excuse that was used for making cannabis illegal.
I do not care about racism in weed or the past. I'm speaking purely from my own experience. I'm also speaking on weed's influence on my future children. Weed does not exist on a vacuum. It doesn't exist for only users and not at all for non-users.
You can’t possibly think kids having easy access to drugs is good.
If you do, you’re just speaking like an addict and I would suggest some help.
Why would you bring up that straw-man unless you think that you should still be able to control your children’s choices after they become adults? They may be your descendants, but when they are no longer children, you don’t get more than an advisory role in their choices.
In my part of the world, legalization has made it harder for kids to get pot, not easier.
Headline used here: Cannabis use disorder and subsequent risk of depression and bipolar disorder
Specifically, what makes the latter - an Editorialized and Misleading version of the former?
Edit: downvote me daddy
I dont really blame drug users for what is usually escapism from our industrialized society rat race.
1. A director screaming at a subordinate. 2. Employees working so hard that they had to take time off due to health reasons, related to overwork. All were on visas and in this job market they don’t have a lot of options. 3. Employee A being so mean to an employee B that she started crying in a meeting. Employee A wasn’t even reprimanded. I obviously no longer work there.
But yes, it is my perception that is wrong.
It's probably not a great idea that the industry is moving towards high concentration THC and low to zero CBD product.
The "naturally occurring plant" is getting further and further from what's naturally occurring with the psychosis inducing compound coexisting with the psychosis mitigating compound.
It's quite disappointing to walk into a dispensary and see only a tiny shelf in one corner of the store with 1:1 or greater CBD products and 95% of the product on offer as a race to the bottom in CBD potency.
In the majority of people, this won't necessarily result in a psychotic issue, but it's going to happen commonly enough that we're going to have continuing and expanding social issues if 1:1 products don't become more commonplace.
I'd strongly encourage any future legalization legislation to consider marginally subsidizing product that has higher CBD ratios, as often I see that the consumer push towards THC only is related to cost saving against more expensive mixed products.
-----
Not saying you should never use weed, if I go to Amsterdam, I will for sure use it but I don't bring it back home with me. Smoking once every couple of months will not harm you at all, IMHO.
I propose: "Cannabis use disorder correlated to increased risk of both psychotic and non-psychotic unipolar depression and bipolar disorder."
Or even: "People with major depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis are more likely to be addicted to cannabis."
The appropriate title is "Cannabis Use Disorder and Subsequent Risk of Psychotic and Nonpsychotic Unipolar Depression and Bipolar Disorder".
I would never engage in any activity that increases the likelihood of a permanent life ruining mental illness!
I worked inpatient psychiatry for ~6 years.
All substances you consume have non-zero risk associated with them.
Including seemingly benign things like milk.
It's the job of every person to understand their body and to do a risk/reward analysis on anything you consume.
For many, the benefits of THC/CBD/cannaboids outweigh the risks.
> I would never engage in any activity that increases the likelihood of a permanent life ruining mental illness!
I'd be willing to bet a substantial amount that you already do.
Sugar, antibiotics, medications, heavy metals... take your pick.
Cows are hooked up to metal frames with tubes going in and out of all the holes, being pumped full of hormones to keep them lactating.
These tubes, of course, cause infection so they are also pumped full of antibiotics.
The produced milk contains infectious pus. The FDA has (weak) standards on how much pus is permitted in consumer milk. Hint: it's not zero [1].
Milk also has a ton of other allergens. I personally developed an allergy to milk protein that causes rashes and blisters.
My wife, son and step daughter all have the same allergy.
And milk is probably one of the more benign of the terrible things the food industry sells us.
[0]: potentially worse than the UK and Denmark, other systems are either tradeoffs or strictly worse.
probably things have changed now but—-This likely sounds dismissive of psychologist and psychiatrist with regards to technology and I’m sorry for that it’s not what I mean.
I’m just curious where do all these psychiatrists and psychologists happen upon the interest to participate in what is ostensibly a technology form, although strictly speaking, it’s for anything that’s intellectually gratifying…But how do y’all come across it?
I wasn't a psychologist or psychiatrist, I was a Hospital Corpsman in the Navy (medical, kind of like a nurse), I went to what is called "C" school for training in psychiatry, and worked on a few different in-patient psych wards. The closest civilian equivalent would be somewhere between a psych tech and a psychiatric nurse.
As for how I got into that - I sort of fell into it. I did terribly in highschool, and grew up in a small, rural town. I didn't have a lot of options, so I joined the Navy.
I did well on the entrance tests, so was able to qualify for any job I wanted. The recruiter told me the best jobs were nuke power and hospital corpsman, I went with HM thinking it would be easier to get a civilian job afterwards.
I did so well on the exams, I was guaranteed a C school, after boot camp my options were pharmacy or psychiatry. Counting pills didn't sound interesting to me, so here we are.
This was all in the 90s, I'd been writing software and messing around with making games since the late 80s. Suddenly, in the mid and late 90s, writing code became highly in-demand. I bought a laptop (very rare at the time) and spent nights on the ward while the patients were sleeping teaching myself C, C++, and Visual Basic. I started moonlighting on my off time, and was able to get a full time job within a week of getting out of the service.
Been doing it ever since.
I like how the Navy gives people a chance when they might not otherwise, and how you did so well on all your tests that you blew away your high school expectations. So cool!
I'd also ask you to try to avoid further stigmatizing an already misunderstood condition. It's ok to be unsettled by symptoms of schizophrenia and want to avoid developing them yourself! But let's be too dismissive of the lives of those who happen to be diagnosed with a condition.
You wouldn't even try Being Wrong on the Internet even once? I have. It's highly addictive.
Source: my own family.
I'm guessing they don't mean over 6 million Danes have cannabis use disorder, but are talking about the minority that do. In that case I'd wonder which came first, the mental disorder or the cannabis use disorder (I haven't read the full text)
> In the 2013 revision for the DSM-5, DSM-IV abuse and dependence were combined into cannabis use disorder. The legal problems criterion (from cannabis abuse) has been removed, and the craving criterion was newly added, resulting in a total of eleven criteria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_use_disorder
You're trying to refute something I didn't say. I said that "cannabis abuse" became "cannabis use disorder" which is less offensive to pot addicts, but also contains two extra syllables, does that make sense?
That doesn't means and has never meant it is a harmless thing, like some groups portray it to be. "it's just a naturally ocurring plant!"
Education, more information and less zealotry help on both sides of the discusstion. It's not the devil's lettuce they had people think with 60s propaganda, but it's not a panacea either. Extremes are not good.
Some people experience various, mostly mild, forms of cognitive impairment such as sleepiness, thinking everything is funny, and memory issues. Other people seem to enter a state of heightened idea generation, like more of their brain is working on ideation than usual, and perhaps the sort of thing a priest class would find useful (thinking back to when this plant would have been domesticated). I’m sure there are many other types of reaction as well.
If someone experiences priest mode or is around those that do, they will be more positive towards it than others who only see impairment mode. It is much less homogenous in its effect on people than alcohol is.
Because it’s not about (only) the THC. The other cannabinoids, the terpenes, ... all seem to modulate the effect of the high.
The entire thread is HN playing denial of the harmful effects of a thing we've advocated for years, often with no dissent.
(1) Cannabis is a scavenger of metals and users had higher levels of lead and cadmium https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-08-high-blood-urinary-me...
(2) "there's a lot of overlap in terms of the toxins and carcinogens that are in [both] cannabis and tobacco smoke" https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-08-americans-marijuana-s...
Anecdotally, my cannabis use fell into the "use disorder" category and it wrecked me mentally. Thinking back on all of the people I knew growing up who said that cannabis wasn't addictive really shows how ignorant we all were.
That said, I still think it should be legalized. We clearly got the war on drugs really, really wrong.
Regardless of the problems, it is still a personal health issue. Criminalizing causes more harm than good.
It should be sold as a generic drug by pharmacies that make most of their business from other drugs not dispensary entrepreneurs creating massive retail brands like alcohol.
> Caffeine starts off as a physical addiction unlike marijuana. Caffeine also does not require a lot of use from the substance in order to become physically addicted, unlike marijuana. When both substances are consumed in large amounts both have equally terrible withdrawal effects.
Does it cause break downs in families and car fatalities like alcohol?
Does it trigger latent schizophrenia in susceptible individuals like canabis?
Does it create zombies like whatever it is they're consuming in San Fran?
I have one cup of coffee in the morning but there was a time when I was having 4-5 cups and it was affecting my healh negatively.
But is there a well established causal chain of coffee drinkers hurting others from their coffee induced insomnia mental breakdown?
> physical addiction.. withdrawal
And who are coffee's non-using victims? Co-workers putting up with Mr. Grouchie for a day or two?
That'd be great. Lets start by putting a 100% sales tax + $1/50ml ethanol on alcohol. Let's see how inelastic alcohol consumption really is.
In Australia, tobacco is sold behind the counter. Tobacco has plain packaging and there is no advertising or promotion.
This is the way marijuana should be sold - cheap, clean, legal, available, but behind the counter and not advertised or promoted. It should not be like California or Thailand where you can go to cafes or marijuana shops.
Marijuana should not be treated as alcohol however - advertised, commercialised and glorified. Available, cheap, clean is enough.
Hah, in my country 10-15 years ago there was huge brainwash movement pushing pro-marihuana narration, mostly music/rap/etc communities
Edit: I misread your post earlier. Apologies.
I have my thoughts. Feel free to read through my recent post history.
Smoking weed hurts your ability to think and learn. If you have responsibilities to children or shareholders etc you shouldn’t be doing it.
If you don’t and it doesn’t hurt others who are relying on you have at it, but still sparingly as not to be abusing your body and mind.
Or do you adapt a more reasonable appropriate time and place for that type of drug?
I not sure if it hurts peoples ability to learn, even if some people have some memory impairment. But cannabis and other drugs change the way people think, and that can be good or bad depending on many factors. Have people created great creative works under the influence of cannabis? Yes. Would they have been better art if the artist had not consumed cannabis? Maybe not.
I know high functioning executives and parents who work and take care of family all day and eat an edible to go to sleep. And on Sunday night, they might smoke a joint and eat a meal with friends and discuss their next book or investment in between diaper changes.
I could care less if people get high, but as a general principle I will never consume a drug to help me sleep unless there’s a really good (doctor consulted) reason. I think we’re just setting ourselves up for an unhealthy dependence when we do that. (besides weed always had the opposite effect on me)
Without "Spectrum Red #1" I sleep in 2 hour shifts. I consume about 0.3 gm (whole herb vaporiser) around 9pm, by 11pm I'm asleep for 6-8 hours. Most importantly, I don't wake wishing I'd died in my sleep.
Note that I'm on CBD, so I don't get "psychotic" side effects.
I also have some 30%THC Sativa that is used to get me going to do things. I can find more reason to push through pain and move more, which in the longer term reduces the impacts of pain and suffering.
I've seen what you've posted about your experience, and if I'd met you in real life I'd have told you "You know you're probably the kind of person who should never use cannabis". I've said that to a few people over the years. Eventually they agree with me. Sadly it's sometimes after they've fucked their lives irrevocably. Cannabis does not do that to _most_ people though, as they use it non-compulsively.
If you met me in real life before I was an addict, you’d think that I’m the most ambitious person, sharp thinker, completely normal with no mental issues. No alcohol addiction. Never done any drugs. Never smoked cigarettes.
You wouldn’t think of me as someone who should never use weed. That’s what’s scary about weed addiction.
PS. There’s almost no difference between a sativa and indica anymore. They’re all hybrids. Most of the time, it’s just placebo. That’s why edibles don’t label whether it’s sativa or indica. Just THC content.
You might consider taking occasional breaks. Vivid dreams are reported when folks quit.
Just because alcohol is bad for you, doesn't mean weed is good for you.
Alcohol addiction is very noticeable. People around you also notice. Alcohol will destroy both your mind and body. You're much more likely to be aware that you're addicted to alcohol than weed.
Weed addiction is slower. It starts out as only beneficial - until it isn't. Weed will only affect your mind. Unlike alcohol, it won't directly do physical harm to your body. The negative effects to your body from weed is indirect - such as getting lazy, munchies, etc.
>I not sure if it hurts peoples ability to learn, even if some people have some memory impairment.
This has to be a joke right?
Do you have family members who are below 18? If you truly believe what you said, you'd allow them to smoke weed and go to class.
What are your thoughts on coffee/caffeine addiction?
Since HN is mostly pro-weed use, I will most likely get downvoted. But it doesn't matter. I was staunchly on the pro-weed side just a few weeks ago as well until I started reading the downsides and realized that most applied to me and I was an addict. I was a "responsible" user early on as well.
Perhaps this post will help someone else here realize the same.
Here they are:
1. Having a higher IQ
2. Actually getting REM sleep and feeling rested
3. Being able to remember stuff instead of forgetting everything. Even simple things like where I left the keys.
4. Not eating junk food and getting fat
5. Not looking extremely unattractive because I'm fat
6. Actually care about how I look
7. Being able to spend time with people who don't smoke weed. I lost touch with so many successful people because I only wanted to hang out with other stoners.
8. Having motivation and ambition again
9. Not revolving my life around getting high
10. Being a responsible son, friend, boyfriend, employee
11. Being able to work towards the life I actually want
12. Having better lung health
13. Not making my brain smaller
14. Saving money
15. Having dreams again. Both dreams when I'm asleep and dreams when I'm awake.
16. Not dealing with shady dealers (still illegal where I'm)
17. Not trying to convince sober friends to smoke with me and then having them politely decline my invitation
18. Not feeling like life is passing by while I'm high
19. Not having to hide the fact that I smoke weed from my parents, siblings
20. Not spending a huge amount of time on video games, pointless Youtube videos, and doom scrolling while I'm high
21. Not being antisocial
22. Not staying home by myself from 6pm - 2am getting high every evening
23. Not having to put "420 friendly" in my dating profile
24. Not putting off responsibilities
25. Not procrastinate to the max
26. Not having random paranoia while high
27. Not thinking about how I can get weed when I'm planning a trip
28. Not ignoring messages from old friends and family members because I'm more interested in getting high
29. Having a body that isn't built on junk food
30. Not spending an enormous amount of time researching strains and ways to smoke
>What are your thoughts on coffee/caffeine addiction?
I don't know. I don't have enough experience/thoughts on this.
Alcohol has NO safe level of consumption.
Unlike cannabis.
If you say this while consuming other drugs that are harsher and less safe then you should do some self reflection on your prejudices.
So either they think there is a level of cannabis use that is zero risk, or they have a different definition of safe consumption that they could elaborate on.
The difference between toxicity and therapeutic use is what helps define the safety of the substance. There are some, like psilocybin mushrooms, that have a relatively monstrous gulf between therapeutic doses (in the mcg) and toxic doses (presumably in the kg). They are quite safe, though not zero risk. I believe alcohol is relatively unsafe by that measure, while cannabis is pretty darn safe. But that's not the same thing as saying "zero risk". I think the poster is just imprecise with their language when they mean to say "safe" and not "zero risk".
As far as cannabis being "pretty darn safe", a recent study shows it causes heart disease. And more than one study shows it increases the risk of heart attack for up to an hour.
What we really need is an end to prohibition, and continued funding for studies on the substances that are the most popular so folks can make the most informed choices.
To apply this to your example, cannabis was linked to heart disease in daily smokers. As one would expect, the study showed a dose dependent relationship with cannabis and risk.
Just like you can find “some” people who drink daily and become centenarians, you have to be careful about the way you characterize the risk. I believe the better data show more than 4 drinks a week does increase your health risk substantially.
In both cases, it seems like moderation is key, although I maintain cannabis is far safer when you compare the ratio of therapeutic to toxic dosage. But that’s acute risk, where the study you’re talking about is chronic risk.
I don't think the same can be said for cannabis use
Even if we concede the cancer risk, there are other risks that may be unarticulated.
(That said as someone who abstains from both alcohol and cannabis)
The same can already be said of cannabis.
"People who use marijuana have an increased risk of heart disease and heart attack, according to a large study led by researchers at Stanford Medicine.
The study also showed that the psychoactive component of the drug, known as THC, causes inflammation in endothelial cells that line the interior of blood vessels, as well as atherosclerosis in laboratory mice." [1]
Other studies have shown the risk of heart attack goes up in the first hour after smoking cannabis.
Prohibition doesn't work. And we need loads of more studies like this so folks can be well informed in their choices.
However regulations and taxes do work. Smoking cigarettes continues to become less and less popular thanks to information, higher taxes, and other regulations.
Considering how popular cannabis is, we should be funding more research so we can make informed choices, and at tax it at a level that recovers the actual cost to society.
[1] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/marijuana-hea...
Corporate America got a hold of the industry for pure profits.
You can purchase concentrates which are oils or resins at high THC percentages. These are manufactured from plant material to concentrate it not unlike making orange juice concentrate.
The theoretical physical limit of THC development in the plant is around 30%. You cannot find flower that will test much higher than that - if that.
Yes it’s more potent than it was due to - drumroll - modern agricultural practices.
This kind of misinformation parroting is really no bueno.